Original subtitles

For over a millennium,

the whole of Europe was agrarian.

From generation to generation,

men and women

tended the land to feed themselves and others.

But what do we know of their hardships and their dreams,

of their solidarity

and their revolts against all those in power

who tried to seize their fields and labour?

Deprived of power and narratives,

these peasant people lived for a long time

in silence and darkness.

Today, they are said to be on the verge of disappearing,

yet their story is more relevant than ever.

For 15 centuries, it has been marked by the same issue:

that of the land and its use.

I don't think it's a coincidence that there are so many suicides

among farmers these days.

It's a sign of economic hardship

and also of a social hardship.

Farming is hard work but it's bearable

because we do it together

and there's a sense of community.

I'm not saying it's nice every day. We argue a lot with our neighbours,

but we do things together. Whereas the loneliness

of the modern farmer

who works with big machines

on these huge monocultures...

I think there's a loss of meaning

compared to the reality of true peasant work.

There are still many countries in the global south

where there are real farming communities.

Can you be a farmer without having a farming community?

That's a real question.

Is the village community a paradise on earth,

made up of solidarity and harmony,

or rather hell on earth,

filled with hatred and violence?

It's important not to be romantic about peasants.

Peasants can behave very badly to each other.

Male peasants can behave very badly

to female peasants.

Neighbours can behave very badly to each other.

Rich peasants can behave very badly to small peasants.

Villagers can behave very badly to outsiders.

In the early 11th century, there is an account

of a man called Arnulf,

who is wounded by thieves in the Ardennes

and comes to a local village,

dying of his wounds,

and the peasants are very cautious about this.

They suspect him of being

really a thief himself who is spying out

the village in order that the village can be robbed.

Eventually, they're persuaded

that he is authentically wounded

and so then they are nice to him.

But when he dies,

they don't bury him in the village. They bury him on the road

because he's not really a villager.

He can't be buried in the cemetery. He's an outsider.

Of course, none of this may have happened,

but as an image, it's an important one

of the suspicion of outsiders

that is characteristic

of many peasant communities.

MONTMARTRE RAYMOND BERNARD, 1931

The villagers know how to protect

themselves from external threats.

In this 1930s film,

the foreign threat is a young woman

of ill repute.

She comes from the city and is accused

of stealing the village's best catch.

Do you know what we do in Saint Jean

when a widow remarries too soon

or when a woman cheats on her husband?

Or when we don't want someone in the village anymore?

Yes! A charivari.

A charivari!

A charivari

is a concert of live music

given in front of the house of a villager

whose behaviour is being criticised.

It is one of the oldest peasant rituals.

Its origins are obscure.

It probably goes back to old myths

about animals with unbridled sexuality.

Its meaning is unambiguous.

Organised by young unmarried men,

this noisy mayhem stigmatises

marriage between rich and poor,

between partners of different ages,

or any other behaviour

that disrupts the marriage market.

It often accompanied other rituals,

such as the donkey ride,

where a husband who was cheated on or beaten by his wife

was taken for a ride through the village,

sitting backwards on the beast

as a sign that his behaviour

has disturbed the order of things.

In the 20th century,

these humiliating rituals could be more political,

as when harvesters humiliated

a wealthy peasant in southern Italy,

who was happy to re-enact the scene

for the camera of a militant ethnologist.

The violence of peasants was not only a ritual.

In the 16th and 17th centuries,

painters took great delight in these brawls,

which were fuelled by alcohol and gambling,

but by the 19th century,

peasant violence was no longer amusing.

It was frightening.

It appears in picturesque paintings

and legal archives,

highlighting its omnipresence in village life.

Violence originated within the family unit.

They fought, sometimes leading to murder.

Siblings, spouses, fathers and sons

would fight over an inheritance or authority issues,

but the whole family would reunite to confront neighbours

over boundary disputes

or access to isolated plots of land,

whether the goal be claiming such land or denying it to others.

All this was put aside

when neighbours joined forces with those of their own faction,

as in 19th century France,

when the republicans were against royalists.

Lastly, villages would unite

to fight against a neighbouring village.

Throughout the 19th century,

these organised battles, marked by extreme violence,

would bring together several hundred young fighters,

especially in southern France and Spain.

These fights happened between villages,

parishes or communities

arguing over the use of common land.

It was about woods, meadows, spaces

where villagers

would take their animals to graze

and they would fight

because each village claimed

exclusive rights to this space.

Another common cause for conflict

was the marriage market.

If a young man

started to court,

started to woo

a girl from a neighbouring village,

it would provoke hostility from boys in her village,

who felt attacked.

And rightly so,

because it could affect

their chances of getting married.

In the rural society of that time,

a bachelor was considered

a failure.

We have no historical footage,

but there's this popular 1960s film

that portrays village wars

as mere children's games.

It's nostalgic and amusing,

but also somewhat patronising.

It's a way of suggesting that the peasants themselves

were nothing but big children.

There are traces in municipal records or judicial archives,

but it's mainly the press that talked about it.

It described these events

as "acts of savagery"

and drew a very revealing comparison.

In Spain, they would say:

"these rural youths

don't behave differently

from the Berbers of the Rif."

This was a region in northern Morocco that was

colonised by Spain at the time.

Or "like

the savages of the Congo."

It was very common and it says a lot

that, speaking of these violent incidents,

a parallel was drawn between peasants

who were part of the country

and peoples considered primitive.

This clearly shows that spontaneous violence,

not the forms of violence

deemed acceptable,

was perceived

as a trait of uncivilised groups.

"No need to go to America

to observe savages,"

Balzac wrote in 1840

about French peasants.

Geronimo, the Apache chief.

Naïa, the Breton peasant witch.

"They're three centuries behind," said one dignitary.

And another said: "it's hard to imagine that blood

flows beneath their thick skin."

The prefect of Ariège said:

"peasants are as savage

as the bears they raise."

Ahead of other European countries,

France then tried to civilise

these "inner savages".

The word "peasant" was replaced by the word "farmer,"

deemed more dignified,

and which was celebrated during annual ceremonies

known as 'farming shows'.

Simultaneously a fair, festival,

competition and promotion of modernisation,

they were managed by the benevolent patronage of the authorities.

Conscription, mandatory military service,

pushed peasants out of their world,

reducing the gap

between them and the rest of the nation.

One man embodied

these two pillars of integration:

General Bugeaud,

who was both a staunch defender of social order

and a fervent advocate

of the modernisation of agriculture.

In 1830, he applied his ideas in Algeria,

turning the destruction of traditional agriculture

into a weapon of conquest.

"To subdue the natives,

one must burn their crops,

cut down their fruit trees

and kill their livestock."

Once the conquest was complete,

the nomadic populations were forced to settle.

It was the only way to control them

and prevent rebellions.

Finally, indigenous peasants were turned

into agricultural workers serving French settlers.

Traditional crops were replaced

with European crops

intended to feed the homeland.

It was absolutely necessary

to replace all species of plants and animals

with European or French species.

This was not possible

without the elimination

of this category of Algerian peasants.

It was necessary to eradicate,

eliminate this peasantry and replace it.

So, all this discourse

about the development of seeds,

about a colonial type of agriculture,

was developed in the 19th century.

We still hear it today.

We still hear it. We realise today...

For example, in many of our countries,

we have prevented

any creation of a gene bank

that would have preserved

indigenous, local seeds,

which, for many, had been selected

over a fairly long historical period

and which took into account

both the soil, the climate and the techniques

that were mastered by local peasants.

FAMINE IN ALGERIA 1869

The destruction of traditional agriculture

and its social fabric

caused episodes of famine in Algeria

resulting in between 300,000 and 500,000 deaths.

During the same time in Europe,

famine also struck Ireland.

The country had been colonised by the English

who replaced traditional pastoralism

with wheat cultivation and livestock farming,

aimed at the English market.

Irish farmers

were encouraged to grow potatoes,

on which they almost exclusively relied.

On the slopes of Achill Island,

we can still see

the remains of their fields.

Right next to them are the ruins of one of the villages

completely wiped off the map

during the Great Famine of 1847,

owing to several years of poor harvests.

While the peasants were dying by the tens of thousands,

the export of wheat and livestock to England

continued as if nothing were wrong.

It resulted in one million deaths

and one million Irish forced into exile

in America or Canada.

This marked the beginning of a major migration movement

to which, in the next decades, would be added

millions of peasants fleeing

the poorer regions of Europe.

More and more peasants were also leaving

to move into towns.

This movement has existed since the Middle Ages.

Without a constant influx of peasant population,

some major cities would have disappeared,

but with the industrial revolution of the 19th century

it took on another dimension.

The new factories needed labour.

It worked out well.

They also produced at the same time new agricultural machines

and industrial fertilisers

which replaced

peasant labour

making these workers were available for the industry.

Meanwhile,

religion and traditional values were declining.

Liberal laws,

such as the one of 1891

that abolished common grazing in France,

finished dismantling

the old village solidarities.

As a result, in France, the rural population

went from 18 million in 1881

to 15 million in 1911

and to 8 million in 1962,

the year this film was made.

The café and the church,

that's all that remains of the old community life.

The village is just a backdrop

that has lost its meaning.

On the other side,

the promises of the city and modern life

and the desire of a young peasant

to become 'something more'.

Goodbye, guys.

Goodbye, guys.

Keep spinning around on the square.

I'm leaving. For Paris.

In the middle of the 20th century,

the simple desire

to leave

was still portrayed in tragic tones.

Let's jump forward in time to

a farm in the countryside near Nantes.

Come on!

In my parents' time,

you settled in for a career.

Today, I'm not sure that new, young farmers

are settling into this profession for 40 years.

It's the same everywhere. People have plans, things change.

There are definitely things to invent

so that we, as farmers, if we don't want to feel

trapped and stuck in this job,

can do something else.

And then why not come back to this profession later?

That's not so simple today.

We have to have a clear vision of farming so that tomorrow,

people can start out as farmers

and then if at some point, we want to do something else,

like becoming a craftsman or a film director

or anything else... travel around the world...

That needs to be possible for us,

currently only very few of us can do so.

We want to be able to leave farming and then come back to it.

I think that, in the future...

Today, what young person, in any profession,

tells themselves,

"I'm going to do this job for 40 years"?

Only priests say that nowadays.

In 1892, the great flight of peasants

was given a biblical name,

invented by an English writer:

"the rural exodus",

by analogy with the biblical exodus,

the departure from Egypt.

In the Bible,

the exodus marked the end of slavery.

It was a liberation.

But the politicians of the late 19th century

were like Pharaoh,

furious to see these slaves leave.

For them, the rural exodus

was an apocalyptic catastrophe.

The French Minister of Agriculture,

Jules Méline, called the peasants

who left for the city "deserters".

"They are motivated by selfishness

and a poorly calculated ambition

that endanger the preservation

of French military power."

As for Chancellor Bismarck,

who industrialised Germany at a forced pace,

he wanted to keep his peasants

to counterbalance the radicalism of the working class.

At the turn of the 20th century,

the image of the soldier ploughman

had its moment of glory.

Strong and obedient, unlike the worker,

the peasant was promoted to the number one defender

of social order and the homeland.

The peasant who, in the medieval and modern eras,

wasn't really considered interesting,

they were feeding the world and that was it.

Faced with the transformation of societies,

urbanisation, the development of industry,

the question of borders,

the relationship to territory, to the land,

the construction of an identity, all of this hinges on peasants.

Across Europe, we saw the birth

of folkloric movements

and regionalist movements.

Because of a demographic decline

in many countries

the notion that peasants were naturally fertile became popular,

of course this was false, but hey.

This issue

was attached to the question

of war and combat,

as during the time of mass armies and conscripted armies,

the peasant was considered

the ideal soldier.

At least, that's how they were described.

During World War I,

when we started winning,

we were told that it was because the Germans were workers.

A worker couldn't endure the trenches.

He'd go to the café,

wear slippers and work shifts.

He was lazy by nature.

The peasant did as he was told.

From the mid-19th century onwards,

European peasants

gradually gained the right to vote

and became a political force.

They formed parties,

organised themselves and adopted the workers' unions methods.

In France, in 1907,

vineyard workers from the south mobilised

thousands of participants

at massive rallies

denouncing fraud and competition from Algerian wines.

A sign of modernity:

the city was no longer a target for pillaging,

but a backdrop for protest,

an amplifier for their discontent.

Four years later,

it was the vineyard workers from eastern France

who staged a dramatic protest.

Filmed for the very first time,

it showed a ritual - which would become the norm -

of peasant violence.

Much of this violence was instrumentalised

by the farmers themselves,

to make it a stand-out feature

of their repertoire.

They played on representations

that aligned with their identity.

It's this identity

of a peasant close to the earth,

close to primitive forces,

and who, when he's not happy,

expresses this vigorously. They were compared with

a civilisation based on manners.

This representation has existed throughout history

and the peasants reclaimed it

when they began to develop their own discourse

at the end of the 19th century and especially in the 20th century.

Southern Italy, in the 1960s.

In Italian, they are called "braccianti",

"those who have only their arms".

The peasant proletariat.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

there were hundreds of thousands of these agricultural workers

working in the rice fields of northern Italy,

such as those of Tenuta Colombara.

In this dormitory, now transformed into a museum,

slept the "mondine", the rice weeders,

whose work consisted of pulling out

weeds from the rice fields with their bare hands.

Like all factory workers, these women sold their time.

And like in the English factories of the 18th century,

only the foreman was allowed to wear a watch.

Watches were forbidden

so you wouldn't know what time it was.

At the end of the day,

they always kept you

10 or 15 minutes longer

and with 100 women working

15 minutes longer every day,

that's not negligible.

So, the female workers invented a song.

They knew how to tell time by the sun

and when the time came, they sang:

"if you make me work extra,

instead of pulling weeds,

I'll pull the rice."

In 1911,

the rice weeders from the Vercelli region went on strike

demanding an eight-hour workday,

doing so at the same time as factory workers

from all across Europe.

Their sensational actions, such as blocking the railway,

popularised an epic struggle across the country

that was still being celebrated by women workers in the 1960s.

Domenica Battaglia was 20 at the time.

If eight hours seem too little to you

then come and work for yourself

and you'll discover the difference

between working and commanding.

By bicycle, early in the morning,

we quickly set off to work.

The poor life of the weeders,

that's what

they had to do.

Dorino Funotti wanted to show us

how people harvested half a century ago.

We always cut at an angle.

Holding it flat, it won't work.

Like this, it's easier.

You hold it... and thwack.

There... and thwack.

There... and thwack.

There... and thwack.

That was the movement.

Thwack.

1 August 1914.

On the Millevaches plateau,

farmers harvesting

heard in the distance the alarm bell,

which had always sounded the alert

when a storm or hail threatened the crops.

The farmers were surprised.

The sky seemed clear,

but a storm was indeed on its way.

War had just broken out between France and Germany,

a war that left women to do all the work in the fields,

both men's and animals' work,

all requisitioned for the front.

While peasant soldiers died in the mud,

journalists from the cities indulged

in their patriotic and agrarian fantasies.

One of them wrote, "to the obstinate peasant,

mud is not scary.

The cruel existence of the trenches

gives him the satisfaction

of still handling the earth.

The trench from which we launch the assault

is the French soil that has opened up to give birth,

the split earth from which its children spring forth."

The consequences of the war were staggering.

In France, 500,000 farmers died

and 500,000 farmers were mutilated.

In Europe,

farmers were mobilised more

than factory workers

and they believed that their countries owed them a debt.

This was even more true in Italy,

where the government had promised them a major agrarian reform

as soon as the war was over.

This promise was not kept

and in 1919, agricultural workers and poor farmers

launched a general movement to occupy the land.

To stop them,

landowners in northern Italy

called upon far-right militias

composed of former soldiers.

Their victory against what they called "rural Bolshevism"

propelled Mussolini's fascists into the spotlight

and eventually into power.

Far from being merely a pretext

for propaganda,

the issue of agriculture was central

for the dictatorial regimes

that emerged in Europe after World War I.

The Nazi state in Germany,

or the fascist state in Italy,

or what was called in Portugal, the New State,

Estado Novo,

all these things had to be created.

They were not there. It was not like

the state has a structure and imposes

itself on the countryside.

This is how the state invents itself.

And the first thing that you see,

like new state formations of fascism that are different

from earlier regimes,

in all these countries, the first thing that you see,

they are around food production.

They are around this obsession with feeding the national body,

the organic nation, with the national soil.

To feed Italy

with exclusively Italian production,

Mussolini annually launched campaigns for the crops,

named martially as "the battles of wheat."

The Duce himself participated, bare-chested,

displaying his primitive vitality,

but wearing very modern aviator goggles.

The fascist peasant was a soldier.

His weapon was a new type of wheat,

more resistant and better suited to chemical fertilisers

named "Ardito"

in homage to the "Arditi,"

the shock troops of the Italian army

from World War I,

who became the hardcore of the fascist movement.

It had come full circle.

In Nazi Germany, the pig

was the focus of all attention from the authorities.

Technicians worked to create a new breed

producing more fat

while eating less,

so as not to compete with humans.

Potato farming was also rationalised.

Starting in 1934,

out of the 1,500 varieties existing until then,

only 74

were allowed to grow on German soil.

Everything related to agriculture in Nazi Germany

was controlled by a single organisation

called the Reich Food Corporation

and led by Walther Darré,

an enthusiast of "Blut und Boden",

"Blood and Soil",

author of the book "The Pig

as a Criterion of Distinction

between Nordic Peoples and Semites".

When people try to make the case

of the anti-modern dimension of Nazism,

they use Darré, and they use this kind

of rural utopia,

but they tend to forget that we're talking about an institution

that he led, that actually was the one

that brought all these new standardised forms of life

into the German countryside.

And with it comes an entire structure

that reaches every small village in Germany.

I would say that it hasn't been sufficiently appreciated

how much the expansion of this state

relied on having

a control of what people produced

in every village, in every...

throughout the German countryside.

Peasants actually don't have

any control over what they produce

and so you don't make decisions because of your own

interest or for the market

or what you think is best for livelihood. You have to be

accountable to feeding the national body.

You have to produce a pig

that supports the self-sufficiency of Germany.

While imposing modernisation

and the nationalisation of agriculture,

Nazi Germany promoted an archaic rural lifestyle

that was entirely invented.

An official brochure regulated

so-called ancient Germanic dances,

with all dancers required to wear the same costume,

folkloric and mandatory,

imagined by the authorities.

"The goal is not to resurrect the past,"

said a Nazi folklorist,

"but to reunite the country,

undermined by morbidity and diversity

and thus ensure salvation

through its organic roots."

This kind of idealisation of peasantry,

paradoxically, is still alive today.

And I use "paradoxically" because

you see that the whole

modern Romanian system, let's say post-socialist system,

is working against the peasantry.

It's working to establish these

mega-farms, industrialisation,

competitivity.

Big farms, brute production,

not added value necessarily.

But the marketing of these products is, quite paradoxically,

always with this imagery of happy cows

in the nice surroundings, nice grass,

peasants dressed up in traditional costumes.

So it's about...it's really like:

"okay, we give you the image of what you would like

and the..." I don't want to say a bad word,

but..."the trash

that we can produce."

French farmers in the 1930s

were also exposed to fascist temptation

with the Green Shirts movement,

which showcased their actions

in front of cameras for newsreels from America.

They re-enacted the episode of the harassed bailiff

to prevent the seizure of the home of a bankrupt farmer,

that of taxes, paid in sacks of wheat,

and even where they wore clogs

to imitate

the grand peasant gatherings of fascist Italy

or Nazi Germany.

Yes, the discontent among farmers was real,

but the republican tradition was equally strong

and French-style fascism did not take hold.

Only the defeat of France in 1940

and the establishment of the Vichy regime

allowed fascism to expand its influence.

In his second speech as French head of state,

Pétain uttered this famous phrase:

"the land does not lie."

What he implied was, "unlike the Republic,

the Popular Front and cities,

source of all evils."

As the slogan didn't mean much,

it could be used in all sorts of ways,

to exalt either traditional

peasant values

or the merits of modernisation

that all the Vichy technocrats dreamed of.

In June 1941,

Nazi Germany invaded Russia.

The aim was to conquer, for the Reich,

agricultural lands and the peasants that lived there.

It was the largest colonial war in history.

"We will dominate this vast territory

with just a handful of men," said Hitler.

"As for the local peasants,

they can be paid with scarves, necklaces,

anything that pleases the natives."

At the height of its power,

Nazi Germany occupied a large part

of the European continent.

Even though the countries of Western Europe

were treated better than those in the East,

they too were condemned to remain primarily farmers

to feed industrial Germany.

In 1945, Germany was defeated.

Europe found itself divided in two.

In the west, there were parliamentary democracies

while in the east, there were the countries of the socialist bloc

dominated by the Soviet Union.

The symbolic border between the two

was the River Elbe,

the same river that once separated the liberated peasantry of the West

from the oppressed peasantry of the East.

In countries under Soviet domination,

they applied doctrines and methods that had worked

in the Soviet Union of the 1920s.

The peasant class,

which Marx compared to a sack of potatoes,

was destined to disappear,

along with private property.

In the kolkhozes, collective farms managed

like factories,

peasants had to meet quotas

set by the Party to feed the cities,

even if it meant peasants dying of hunger.

In Romania, this Soviet-style collectivisation

began in 1945.

It started as a promise,

as a promise that it will be better.

It started as a painting and a very colourful picture

of people working the unified lands

and being more productive together

and being at the centre of production, to be important.

And many indeed bowed down to the idea.

Many farmers,

especially

the not-so-prosperous farmers,

the more impoverished farmers at the time,

bowed down easily because the promise reached them

that they will be more economically viable.

But then, because of Romania's strong peasant past,

most of the peasants were actually immune to this,

so nice words didn't work for them.

For them, the only thing that seemed to work,

and that Ceausescu started to really apply, is force.

People have been taken away

during the middle of the night. They were beaten to death.

They were frightened. They were persecuted

until they ceded their lands to the cooperatives.

So this was the most brutal form of taking away the land

while taking away the peasant spirit.

I can talk about this in a very private way,

because my grandfather was one

of these figures whose land was taken away.

And unfortunately, he didn't want to,

so he was persecuted months at a row.

He was persecuted to a point where

he decided that his life

cannot be like that and he hung himself.

And it's a very painful way

to lose a grandfather,

because he lost his life

because he lost his land,

because he saw his land being lost.

So this is something that the drama

can be multiplied almost millions of times.

The archives of the Museum of Agriculture in Prague

hold the official images of collectivisation

in communist Czechoslovakia,

where leader Clement Koswald

made a promise to Stalin:

"we won't just talk about the collective farms,

we will create them."

Ceremonies to celebrate

the reorganising of collectivised lands.

A peasant woman looking happy to offer her cow to the collective.

Competitions between villages

to meet the required quotas

and walls of shame

for villages that failed to meet them.

That's what could be seen at the time

and that's what was hidden.

A message was recently discovered in a door lining

during renovation work on an old farmhouse.

1957:

"they treat us like the serfs of days gone by.

We're afraid to live."

In the meanwhile in Italy,

the government made a film

to support a land reform

aimed at calming down the communist unrest

in rural areas.

This reform mainly helped

some of the poorest regions.

Between Livorno and Rome, the Ente Maremma Agency

gave poor farmers a house

and a bit of low-quality land.

In return they were expected

to embrace modern ways.

The idea was this: "this farmer doesn't know what he's doing,

so we'll bring him

into the modern world.

You're poor because you're stupid

and we'll teach you how to live

as you need to do things

like the big modern farms are doing

and you're not modern."

I have the book on my table

where they explained things in this manner,

with unbearable demagoguery and paternalism.

People were forced to join cooperatives,

but it all stemmed from

fascist colonial culture.

"You're an idiot and we're telling you what to do."

It was madness.

At one point,

the Land Reform Agency

even decided it wanted to promote

cotton farming for the emerging

textile industry.

Picture it:

cotton fields and the blues, here.

You've got to be mad, or stupid,

or corrupt.

Antonio Onorati

still lives in the Ente Maremma house

that his father was given in 1952,

even though he refused to join the new cooperative

as beneficiaries of the reform were supposed to do.

The agrarian reform wanted to push him into a cooperative,

but my father refused. His stance was clear:

"I've escaped one foreman, I don't want another."

That sentiment, that feeling, is really at the heart of

the peasant spirit.

They labelled it as reactionary,

but I've always stood firm. We led struggles

when I was younger on this

and I see this as being

all about freedom,

about autonomy - it's the essence of peasant life.

It's not about being against other peasants.

The land, it's a form of freedom

for all those who work it.

That's crystal clear. It was not about ownership,

it was about having the ability to tend

to your own land,

to do things your way, without foremen.

As my father used to say,

"there's only God and rain.

The rest is up to us."

A patchwork of fields.

That's how the French countryside looked before the last war.

Small, cramped plots

leading to loss of cultivable land,

scattered parcels,

often inconvenient to reach, resulting in a waste of time.

Since the 18th century,

every attempt to modernise agriculture in France

stumbled upon the issue of reorganising plots of land,

no regime dared to mess with the strong base

of small independent farmers.

It was only in 1955

that the French government finally took the plunge

and paved the way for modernisation

and mechanisation.

Of course they destroyed a lot more

than the former shapes of the fields.

"A farmer on his tractor

will no longer think like a farmer behind his horse,"

wrote a supporter of agricultural mechanisation.

That's right. A farmer on his tractor considered

the prices of fuel, fertilisers

and grain and worried about his debts.

Fields became larger, better laid out, more accessible.

This results in time savings, improved quality and surface area.

In every aspect,

a better use of land capital.

There you have it, they've said it all, or almost.

Whether in the East or the West,

modernisation and rationalisation,

no matter the regimes,

advanced in a strangely similar manner,

supported by states

and later the European Community.

Industry served as the model.

Fields became factories.

Dairy cows were turned into digestive machines.

"Producers", not "peasants" were now deemed to be

expert technicians.

And it worked, maybe too well.

From the 1980s onward,

we realised we were producing too much.

This led to disastrous outcomes

like plummeting prices and markets.

Since storing was costly, we reversed the trend.

Production no longer got subsidies.

Instead, destruction did.

Moreover, a string of crises,

from mad cow disease to climate change,

sped up awareness of the ecological catastrophe

and challenged this production-driven model.

The dominance of industrial farming has continued,

yet alongside it, other methods have emerged,

including the peculiarly named "peasant agriculture",

which aptly highlights what has been lost

and what we need to strive to regain.

We, the young farmers

who work on organic farming systems,

selling directly to consumers,

trying to be environmentally coherent,

although it's impossible to be perfect,

we're completely exhausted!

We have to run from 6.30 in the morning

until 10 at night.

When the day is over,

we know we haven't done a tenth of what should have been done,

not even a tenth.

The reality is that

running sprinklers

is a complete waste of water,

but it's a way to save my own energy.

In fact, it would be much more efficient

to take a watering can and water each plant,

but just me, alone, I don't have the strength for that.

So to be able to do things properly, we would need to be...

not just twice as many peasants,

but 10 or 20 times as many, in a country like France.

Are people willing to do this work?

When I started this job,

I imagined how wild nature returned

after the fall of the Roman Empire.

A big tangle of roots, twisted like the ones

from old vines

described by a writer from the 4th century,

who saw them as the sign

that civilisation was ending.

There are many abandoned vines

in France today.

Here, one vine grew so big

it's as high as a tree.

Here, you can still see where the rows used to be.

None of this is impressive or scary.

The vines were left

because they weren't profitable

and it cost too much to remove them.

It's quite sad,

all things that have been left behind are sad.

A graveyard of peasant work.

Another cemetery, equally abandoned.

This is where the rice field workers of Colombara

used to be buried.

They were hundreds,

now replaced by a few men and their machines.

Everyone knows the statistics,

the steady erosion of European peasant farming,

whose extinction is expected soon,

it has been expected for a long time, or so some say...

It seems inevitable.

Hopeless. And yet...

Those who believe that there is only one dominant model,

that of industrial agriculture,

are contradicted by the numbers.

In Europe, as in Italy,

the agricultural system is diverse.

There is an industrial system,

a peasant system and an intermediate system.

These three blocks exist.

They have different modes of production;

they have different economies.

There is a peasant agriculture

and a peasant economy

that has a different way of looking at things

compared to those who invest capital.

Peasant agriculture invests in work.

That's what my brother does, what I do.

That's why it allows us

to continue working together.

You put in the work, you put in the intelligence,

you put in the muscles

and on that you produce an income,

not a profit.

Industrial agriculture, on the other hand,

invests capital.

When you invest capital,

the calculation is profit.

It's neither good nor bad;

it's just a different

way of thinking, a different logic.

If you talk to a supermarket,

they ask you how many tonnes you have.

If you have 120 sheep,

they look at you and ask, "how many lambs?

1,000, 2,000?"

"No, 50". There's no way you can do a deal with them.

It's like that all the time.

We have to fight day after day to defend

a way of production

that exists without the support of public policy

and that continues despite this.

So if there's any proof of our usefulness,

it's the fact that we're still here,

we're still here.

We are proud to be farmers.

We have reason to be.

Subtitles: TransPerfect Media